Israeli trial may help to create Palestinians' future leader

The world may have caught a glimpse of the future Palestinian leader yesterday when Marwan Barghouthi was brought into the Tel Aviv district court handcuffed but full of defiance.

A master of the political stage, he vented his anger in three languages - Arabic, Hebrew and English - to make sure his message was heard by his many audiences.

He assured Palestinians that "the intifada will win"; he told Israelis that he is "a man of peace"; and he tried to persuade the world that Israel, not the Palestinians, should be indicted.

His trial promises to be a political battle from which Mr Barghouthi could emerge as the man most likely to lead Palestinians after the demise, by natural causes or otherwise, of the septuagenarian Yasser Arafat.

The mere fact of his arrest in April has raised the stature of the man who was already the voice of the Palestinian uprising. A recent opinion poll ranked him as the most popular leader after Mr Arafat.

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Such is his reputation that even as he prepared to face trial on terrorism-related charges, Mr Barghouthi was being asked to give his blessing from his prison cell to a possible agreement among Palestinian factions to stop attacking civilians in Israel.

As a grassroots activist born in the West Bank who spent several years in exile, Mr Barghouthi straddles the divide in Palestinian politics between "insiders" and "outsiders". Moreover, he appears untainted by the corruption of the Palestinian Authority.

Mr Barghouthi hails from a generation of Palestinian activists who established their credentials in Israeli jails. Most have learnt Hebrew from their warders, and Israeli officials often say they these former inmates are more straightforward to deal with than Mr Arafat.

Mr Barghouthi, born in 1959 in a village near the West Bank town of Ramallah, joined Fatah, the main Palestinian faction led by Mr Arafat, at the age of 15.

With the outbreak of the first Palestinian uprising at the end of 1987, Mr Barghouthi helped to organise the revolt from Amman and then from Tunis, Mr Arafat's headquarters in exile.

He returned to Ramallah after the signing of the 1993 Oslo peace accords and became the leader of Fatah in the West Bank.

The second Palestinian uprising in September 2000 threw him into the spotlight as the spokesman of a revolt that quickly evolved from mass stone-throwing riots into a guerrilla war.

But in an article for the International Herald Tribune last January, Mr Barghouthi wrote: "I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated - the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else."

In the view of the Israeli government, Mr Barghouthi is both spokesman and mastermind for the intifada. He is accused of being the undeclared head of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a Fatah faction responsible for many shootings and suicide bombings.

But many Israeli officials also know that as they put him on trial, they are turning him into a Palestinian icon. They may yet find themselves shaking hands with the man they accuse of being responsible for the death of hundreds of Israelis.